Yuhan Tang
Songbird
The year I learnt to look back when I heard Suizi—those two crisp syllables coming out of someone’s mouth, I was two. My response was always the same, a smile that showed the rows of my front teeth.
The year Grandma died, I became very quiet and withdrawn, finding it harder to smile. Sometimes, neighbors would peek through our windows to get a view of Dad; to see just how he talked to himself for hours at a time. Then they would realize that Dad was talking to me, repeatedly yelling my name, begging me to drink my milk, to eat the eggs, to go outside for a while.
The first time I talked to Wei Zhiyuan was just after Grandma passed away. He was the son of our old concierge, who had retired and brought him in from the countryside. Zhiyuan was not like his father at all. He never stood in the middle of the yard to yell: “Qiu Zhen’s on the phone!” or “Qiu Zhen sent registered mail!” Zhiyuan never did any of that. He always knocked gently on our door, and as soon as I opened it, he would blush and say, “Your dad’s on the telephone!”
Zhiyuan sat on his father’s broken bench and read every day. Nothing could disturb him from his reading. When people walked by, he only lifted his eyes from the book a slight inch and could tell who had passed just by glancing at their feet. Sometimes when he saw a large group of feet clad in faux army boots, stomping into the gates of the Writers’ Association, raking up dirt and dust, he would quickly lower his eyes. It was only when the yellow clouds had cleared that he would glance up to see their backs, the backs of those wearing fake military uniforms storming out, and the backs of those being dragged behind them.
Wei Zhiyuan also knew my pair of shoes, with the worn edges and tattered soles. Without having to look up, he said, “Suizi. The day your father got dragged away, you didn’t collect any milk for your family.”
I looked down at him dotingly, saw the half-moon of his forehead resting atop his eyes, fixated on the words, not on my face, and asked, “What’s that book you’re reading?”
He flashed me the front of his book.
I noticed that there was no cover, let alone a spine. His books were always without a title. I always thought books were supposed to be named, for as soon as they had their title, people could identify what they were: bourgeoisie or feudalist, anti-Party or Communist. Without a title, you meant nothing, and the people didn’t know what to do with you.
“Look at this, Zhiyuan,” I said to him, and watched him slowly lift his eyes from his book to my red checkered trousers. I watched him take in the colorful chilblains on my hands, the piece of rice porridge glistening on the chest of my coat, and finally my hair, which I had trimmed all by myself.
We were so close that I could read the words in his book. The sheer number of words made me nauseous, and the only words I saw were evil, evil, evil, big, big, and granary.
I sighed deeply. As it turned out, he also liked operas sung by Aunt Zhu.
Every time Aunt Zhu was dragged out, Zhiyuan would stand up respectfully and move to the side of his bench, as if offering his seat. He just stood there, watching her legs flail around while they tried to tug her away, not knowing who he ought to help. I understood his dilemma. Aunt Zhu had always been revered for her magnificence on the stage, and no one in our neighborhood had truly wanted to see her hurt, only her title. Just like no one had wanted to see my dad dragged away into the cowshed. The man they were dragging away was not “Lao Qiu” but Qiu Zhen—the one who wrote Zhu Yijin’s script.
The sky darkened, and Zhiyuan returned to his book. As usual, an old man came in with a rope over his shoulders, and a flatbed cart attached to that rope. There was always a lot of waste paper at our place, because writers from all over the province lived here. In the past, they wrote books and plays, but now they wrote confessions, self-criticisms, and denunciations, so a lot of paper ended up floating around. Young revolutionaries in their uniforms would also come by to paste slogans on our walls. Then, when another batch of teenagers arrived, the previous batch of big-character posters became the new waste paper; no matter how fresh the paste smelt, fresher paste would cover it up, and by the time the old man arrived, it would have become waste paper again. Our building used to be made of red bricks. Now, not a single red brick could be seen. When the wind blew, the whole building rattled; when it rained, ink dripped all over the walls.
If it weren’t for this old man, we would have drowned in all that white paper. Luckily for us, the old man had a passion for tearing the papers down, and every time he ripped at the sheets, the sound crisp and clear, he hummed pleasantly. He soon pulled a cart full of white paper out the gate, and made his way into the bamboo grove.
Aunt Zhu used to live behind the dead bamboo grove, and it was there that she cut off her long hair. She did it early so that no one would cut it off for her. Once, my father brought me to the Spring Festival Gala, and it was there that I saw Aunt Zhu. Her abundant hair was gathered at the back of her head, styled into a delicate honeycomb, and she had a cigarette in her hand, held it daintily, exactly how I imagined a famous actress would. When she smiled, she showed two long rows of white teeth, and when she talked, she flicked her water sleeves around lightly, as if about to throw it in someone’s face. Everyone used to look at her hypnotic sleeves and blink happily.
When she came up to us, she looked at me first and said mistily, “Lao Qiu, your daughter is so sweet! Oh, look at her pretty, round face…” Then she tossed one of her signature sleeves at father. Both of us were stunned by her beauty, her audacity, and in that moment, I knew we were thinking the same thing. That Aunt Zhu was like a nymph. She walked away with her water sleeves still fluttering. She walked as if there was no ground at all; as if she were gliding through on a boat.
The next time I saw Aunt Zhu, she was on a compact stage. There was no opera to be heard, yet a crowd still gathered before the show. The temporary stage set was tiny, and the critics had to take turns to go up.
“Why are you squeezing in?” snapped a young general, shoving me back.
Still, I kept pushing, parting through the crowd. I squeezed through the line of tall hats squatting beneath the stage, waiting for their turn to be slandered and doused in ink. It was hard to spot Aunt Zhu among all the downcast faces, the shaved heads beneath the flimsy paper hats.
The young general caught me and snatched me up by the back of my jacket. “Hey you! Stop causing trouble!”
It was then that I spotted Aunt Zhu. Her face was barely visible under the tall hat. She rested one inky hand on her chin, while the other hand was raised in the air, holding a cigarette.
“Screw you!” I shouted at the boy.
Aunt Zhu looked up and found my voice among the throngs of people. The young general yelled back, a look of menace spreading across his face, “Say that again!”
“Your momma’s a bitch!” I said, spitting in his face, then I looked back at Aunt Zhu triumphantly, letting her see just how much I had achieved.
Aunt Zhu sat dazed for a while, then suddenly started laughing. Covering her mouth with an ink-splotched hand, she laughed almost operatically. It was probably because of her hearty laugh that Aunt Zhu had to be criticized separately. Her tall hat was made taller than all the others, and an even heavier string of shoes were placed around her neck.
Aunt Zhu had an accident last night, according to her Guangdong nanny. It took a lot of effort for everyone to hear through that Guangdong accent and understand that Zhu Yijin “took poison.”
“What poison?” everyone asked.
“Sleeping pills!” cried the nanny, “One hundred of them!”
“Oh,” someone said.
“That would take a long time to eat, right?” another asked.
The door of Aunt Zhu’s house was sealed, and the nanny was forcibly released from service. Young revolutionaries came to their yard and told the nanny many times, “You’ve been liberated! You can go back to your hometown now!” The nanny just thanked them and said, “Then can you buy me a train ticket?”
It was six o’clock in the evening when I went to the hospital to see Aunt Zhu. The hospital was having dinner, and the sound of enamel basins echoed throughout the entire building. I didn’t know her bed number, so I searched floor by floor. A nurse touched my shoulder and asked who I was looking for. What’s the illness? She asked. No illness, I replied. It was suicide. The nurse quickly withdrew her hand and told me they didn’t have a suicide department in their hospital.
Later I found out that they did have a “suicide department.” All the beds stuffed in the corridors had little signs on them, and in the box of “cause” it read “suicide in fear of criminalization.” The patients had all been found halfway through suicide; some had botched their attempt, others grew afraid as they were dying, choosing instead to let the revolutionaries arrest them. Auntie Zhu had just filled her stomach with pills when the two young men sent to interrogate her arrived, and the two pill bottles were still rolling gently on the table as they grabbed her feet and hauled her away.
On the sixth floor, I saw many people eating in the corridors. Several of them were on crutches and had difficulty standing. I didn’t know how these people with crutches could climb six floors, unless they were that desperate to see Aunt Zhu. I squeezed through the throng of people and saw a bed opposite the women’s toilets, and on the bed was Aunt Zhu, stripped entirely of her clothes, with only a pearl necklace around her neck.
The nurse working on Aunt Zhu was not much older than me. She gave Aunt Zhu an injection, but there was no blood. She gave it another try, and still, no blood. The doctor coaxed her by saying, “Don’t panic, take your time. Didn’t you always practice on rubber in nursing school? Just treat her like she’s the rubber.”
Aunt Zhu had lost all control of her body by then, and obeyed whoever was manipulating her body. Her eyes open, staring into the cobwebs on the ceiling. No matter how the needle pierced her flesh, she didn’t blink.
After the nurse and doctor finished their work, they covered Aunt Zhu’s white body with a thin sheet. As if a curtain had been drawn, the onlookers shrank their necks, smacked their lips, and filed out slowly.
I barged into the nurse’s duty room, where an old nurse was knitting.
“Hey!” I shouted, “Why don’t you give people quilts?”
“Where did you come from, kid? Get out,” she said, her lack of interest fiercer than anger.
“It’s cold without a quilt! And why won’t you give people clothes?”
The old nurse continued to stitch, “What clothes does she need? She’s just a cheap Chinese cabbage. She won’t find it cold, she doesn’t feel shame!”
“Chinese cabbages also know how to be cold!” I screamed, “They also know what it’s like to feel ashamed!”
The doctor came out at this moment and looked at us, his hands full of soap bubbles. He was washing them after he touched Aunt Zhu’s skin, as if only large amounts of soap could get them clean. He smiled at me coyly and said, “Is she your mother?”
“She’s your mother!” I fired back.
That finally annoyed them, so they threw me a quilt.
I wrapped Aunt Zhu tightly, then sat on the edge of her bed and dozed off. When I woke from my nap, I discovered the quilt had been pulled aside. Aunt Zhu was once again lying open and exposed in the net of rubber tubes.
I went home and told all this to Zhiyuan. He listened with his head bowed, and I could only see the bluish-white hair on the top of his head. The round swirl was so white that it seemed blue, and I couldn’t help but want to reach out and touch it.
“Wei Zhiyuan, are you listening?”
He said nothing. So, I spoke up again, “They said Aunt Zhu might wake up in a few days. A young revolutionary said that once she wakes up, they’ll lock her up with the others and she won’t ever take sleeping pills again.”
He still ignored me. In fact, he’d never paid much attention to me, or anyone else. Someone mentioned before that in the early twilight before dawn, they could hear singing in the men’s bathroom. The rumor was that it was some ghost of an opera singer. I wasn’t scared of ghosts. So the next day, I barged in and saw that the opera singer was Zhiyuan. He was squatting on the latrine, singing so touchingly that his eyes were rimmed with red.
He must have liked Aunt Zhu’s operas as much as I did. Once, he brought a stack of paper to my house to seek advice from my dad, saying that it was a play he had written for Aunt Zhu. After he left, Dad stuffed the pile of papers under his bed. All the manuscripts he owned were stuffed under his bed, and the new ones were stuffed in before the mice finished nibbling the old ones.
A week later, Zhiyuan came to knock again. I asked him if there were any calls for us, and he shook his head. “Registered mail?” Dad asked. But Zhiyuan only smiled and delivered his new manuscript into Dad’s hands, saying, “This is another version, if you could look at it as well…”
Dad had no time for Zhiyuan or for reading, so he grabbed the paper and feigned looking through it, saying, “Oh… I’m seeing something wonderful! How about next week? I’ll talk to you, alright?”
Zhiyuan still didn’t leave. He asked what time.
“Anytime,” Dad replied, full of impatience.
Zhiyuan came again the following week. Hearing his “tack-tat-tat” knock on the door, Dad hurriedly put on my mother’s dirty coal-handling gloves, and as soon as the door opened, he said, “Oh look, we’re moving some coal cakes!…” When Zhiyuan remained silent, Dad said to him, “How about next week? I’m tired today.”
Zhiyuan came knocking on our door every week after that. Later, the Cultural Revolution also came and saved my dad.
Aunt Zhu had been in the hospital for three days now, with no sign of getting better. I brought in a small folding chair from home and set it down beside her bed. Everyone came to ogle at her body, and when they saw me sitting there, glaring back, some walked away. I seldom went to the bathroom, because every time I came back from the toilet, Aunt Zhu's bright body would be exposed again. I also tried not to sleep, except that was hard. Once I grew sleepy and saw an electrician come towards the bed. He saw my head drooping and my eyelids half-closed, so he pretended to relax his mouth and dropped his cigarette butt onto Aunt Zhu's quilt. As if a cigarette butt would set Aunt Zhu on fire, he patted down her body and the edges of the quilt. But no matter how he shook his arms up and down, the quilt still wouldn’t budge. At last, he simply grabbed the quilt and lifted it.
As soon as his eyes fell on Aunt Zhu, his hand froze. Aunt Zhu’s beauty had long fled from her body. Her chest was shrinking and drying day by day, and her two water sleeve arms were starting to wrinkle. Aunt Zhu looked like a stuffed white butterfly, nailed here before she died, so that spectators could all watch her slowly fade away.
The electrician whipped around when he heard a noise from my side, and slowly backed away when he saw angry tears glistening on my face.
On New Year’s Eve, my mother came to the hospital to take me back home.
“Your dad’s been released from the cowshed for the New Year! You need to come back home.” She was angry but was too afraid to raise her voice with all the people around.
I said that I couldn’t come. I was guarding Aunt Zhu, and since there were so many people who couldn’t keep their hands off her quilt, I had to be here watching over her.
Ma took in my dirty and stubborn face, and shook her head at me. “When Aunt Zhu gets better, and she’s back to being famous on the stage, she’ll never even remember you!”
I thought that when Aunt Zhu woke up, the first thing I would tell her was to not go back to that stage again.
When she saw that I didn’t plan to leave, Ma seized me by the arm. Her fingers were cold, and the scent of beauty cream flowed from her, familiar and dear. When I looked back at Aunt Zhu, still lying miserably under the dirty quilt, I suddenly grabbed onto my mother’s hand tightly—the only hand in the world that smelt like this cream; the only hand that felt clean and safe.
Dad was just another old farmer now. At dinner, he slurped down the sticky porridge Ma made, his neck bent so low that his chin scraped against the table. After guarding Aunt Zhu for five days, I became even quieter. No matter how Dad tried to talk to me, I didn’t speak. I spooned the porridge into my mouth one bite at a time, wincing as it scalded my newly sprouted tooth. There was only one person I would be willing to talk to, but he was no longer sitting at his bench.
When I returned after New Year’s Eve, I found Aunt Zhu’s bed was empty. Her oxygen cylinder was still lying there, and the bunch of tubes that used to go in and out of her body were cast on the floor in a tangle.
I barged through the door of the nurse’s duty room. This time it was a young nurse who was also knitting. I berated her with questions, asking where Aunt Zhu had gone.
Her eyes widened at first, then narrowed into slits. The look on her face told me everything: the hospital was short-staffed on New Year’s Eve, and all the patients were made to go home. In the midst of all this, someone must have pulled out Aunt Zhu’s oxygen tube, along with all the other tubes that kept her alive.
I walked back down the empty hallway to the stairs. There was no longer a gathering of people. Not a single audience. The show was over. No more Aunt Zhu. No more frail nudity to gawk at.
In the early hours of the morning, I set out to find Zhiyuan. His bench was still empty, so I treaded through the dead bamboo grove to knock on his door.
When he cracked open the door, I told him frantically that someone had killed Aunt Zhu. His gaze roamed around, resting on a spot in the distance. I felt it was odd that he didn’t emanate the warmth of someone who had just been awakened. His face was completely sober, cheeks pale and lips white.
I told him it was freezing outside and that I wanted to be let in. He didn’t budge. When I asked again, he told me to get the hell out and shut the door.
Dissatisfied with his response, I ran around to his back window, which he had covered from the inside with fresh newspapers. When I leaned in to examine the print, I discovered that they were dated as yesterday’s. There was a sliver of light coming through the top where the newspaper did not cover, so I stood on tiptoes and squinted through the slit.
My eyes combed every corner of the room, and saw that Zhiyuan sat in the middle of his room, tearing books. Books were stacked in great piles around him, all coverless and bare, and he fed them slowly, page by page, into a small stove. I could only see him, yet I had a gnawing feeling that someone else was present.
That was when I saw his bed, and the string of shadowy pearls arranged neatly in its center. At the hospital, those pearls always nestled so sweetly, cuddling up to Aunt Zhu’s flesh. I thought it must have been her favorite jewelry, for she donned them before taking her bottle of pills.
Zhiyuan never looked up or noticed me. He only kept stuffing his books into the stove, burning page after page. I watched him burn a few more, before making my way home. I walked back along the grove, listening to the dead bamboo leaves crunch beneath my feet. When I was almost out of the grove, I turned back.
I could no longer see Zhiyuan’s house, since the untrimmed bamboos were taller than my eyes, but I saw gray paper ash flying out from the iron chimney. Some chunks were big, and some were small, but they all turned over and over in the windy sky, an ashy snowfall.
When Wei Zhiyuan resigned and went back to the countryside, I took up his place on the bench. Gradually, I also learned to recognize people by their feet as they passed by.
I was nineteen when I stopped reacting to the sound of ‘Suizi.’ I’d lost half my hearing trying to blast down the abandoned cowshed where they once tormented Dad. Like with Aunt Zhu’s hair, I cut off my own so that no one else could. Now, Dad really does converse with himself. And when I think no one can hear me, I find myself a spot in the bamboo grove and sing Aunt Zhu’s songs. I sing the parts that I can remember. I sing them loud. But the wind always carries them away.
“The fictional events and perspective of the young protagonist within this work were deeply influenced by the experiences of a former literature teacher of mine, shaped by the overwhelming sense of compassion for people and for humanity I have observed in her, in spite of the challenges she has faced.” —Yuhan Tang
Yuhan Tang is an emerging writer and artist based in Sydney, Australia. She is fascinated by ambiguous narratives that allow one to enter a subjectivity, and suspend judgement. Her fiction has previously appeared in Fterota Logia, and is forthcoming in TeenWritersProject.